5 ms·

At some point, spammers are going to be using LLMs, if they're not already. So it'll just be LLMs trying to talk to each other.

chefandy 2y ago
Right. Also, literally every incremental progression in this arms race is good for maybe a few weeks or months for the people that bother engaging while the rest of us have to trudge through deepening layers of bullshit and counter-bullshit to use our basic services. It’s like the entire tech world knows we’re ruining everything the same way we ruined the job finding/hiring process but target fixation won’t let us correct our course to avoid certain misery. Progress!
- darkhorse222 2y ago
  I'm not sure we as a collective have any autonomy. At the macro scale humans are very much shaped by environment + incentives. I suppose governance can help.
  - ses1984 2y ago
    Fucking Moloch ruining everything again.
  - chefandy 2y ago
    If you remove the factors of environment and incentives then no living thing does anything, ever. We have no less control of this than any other collective human endeavor, and even if individual responsibility alone can’t practically stop something bad from happening, individuals are still morally responsible for their own contribution. It’s very comforting to absolve yourself of responsibility for something bad because everybody else is doing the same thing. Philosophically, it doesn’t hold water. A looter is no less morally culpable for stealing because they had significant incentives to loot a store, everybody with them was also looting the store, and there’s no way their abstinence could have stopped the store from being looted
- pdfernhout 2y ago
  Such an arms race probably won't end up anywhere good. Thus my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." LLMs are tools of abundance. Scammers (and apparently even anti-scammers as here) are using these tools from a perspective of scarcity. Rather than help build more wealth for everyone, they burn wealth through competition. Consider instead as just one alternative if, say, the anti-scammer LLM helped the scammer figure out how to get more meaningful work? Maybe that specific alternative won't be effective (dunno), but the alternative at least points in a healthier compassionate direction. For more on this, see my essay from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and "economic"] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure [and economic] are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military [and economic] uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."
itake 2y ago
I think scammers have a specific bad script for a reason. They want to find the most gullible people they can.
- szundi 2y ago
  Or is it that cheap that they don’t waste time on making it better until the “numbers come”
stavros 2y ago
They have been for years: https://thespamchronicles.stavros.io/welcome/ https://thespamchronicles.stavros.io/welcome/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
K0balt 2y ago
By responding at all, it’s probably just helping spammers warm up numbers, more than anything else. So, counterintuitively, helping the spammers. Spammers need to amass a strong baseline of “organic” received SMS responses in order to be unthrottled so that they can effectively spam. Responding STOP will get the number blacklisted after a relatively few strikes.
- ses1984 2y ago
  In the US they can just spoof numbers.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    Not sure how that works, but I think the message would have to be emitted from an approved dial peer? Or are you just talking about caller id spoofing?
    - ses1984 2y ago
      I was talking about caller id spoofing. If there was another layer to it, I was unaware.
  - Evidlo 2y ago
    I'm not sure if any of these numbers are actually spoofed. When I look them up they are always VOIP numbers.
Lio 2y ago
Unless spammers get better at detecting LLMs themselves that will make them easier to tie up so that maybe a win if there is some cost in do so. If the spammer’s LLM costs more to run that the decoy LLM it may be possible to make still be possible to make it an unprofitable activity.
- catlifeonmars 2y ago
  Spammers (and scammers) are incredibly cost sensitive. It’s still an arms race in that regard.
base698 2y ago
This was a major plot point of the movie Her. I remember thinking it was wild when it dawned on me that was what was happening in human to human interactions. Now here we are.
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
This this reminds me of a call in the '90s where I was calling from France a support in the US. I told them that I was calling from France but the insisted on having a US number to connect me "if needed". I saw a number on a paper ad on my desk and proceeded to spell it out, stripping the +1. I wondered several times since then whether their telemarketing dept contacted the telemarketing team in that other company.

chefandy 2y ago

Right. Also, literally every incremental progression in this arms race is good for maybe a few weeks or months for the people that bother engaging while the rest of us have to trudge through deepening layers of bullshit and counter-bullshit to use our basic services. It’s like the entire tech world knows we’re ruining everything the same way we ruined the job finding/hiring process but target fixation won’t let us correct our course to avoid certain misery. Progress!

darkhorse222 2y ago
I'm not sure we as a collective have any autonomy. At the macro scale humans are very much shaped by environment + incentives. I suppose governance can help.
- ses1984 2y ago
  Fucking Moloch ruining everything again.
- chefandy 2y ago
  If you remove the factors of environment and incentives then no living thing does anything, ever. We have no less control of this than any other collective human endeavor, and even if individual responsibility alone can’t practically stop something bad from happening, individuals are still morally responsible for their own contribution. It’s very comforting to absolve yourself of responsibility for something bad because everybody else is doing the same thing. Philosophically, it doesn’t hold water. A looter is no less morally culpable for stealing because they had significant incentives to loot a store, everybody with them was also looting the store, and there’s no way their abstinence could have stopped the store from being looted
pdfernhout 2y ago
Such an arms race probably won't end up anywhere good. Thus my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." LLMs are tools of abundance. Scammers (and apparently even anti-scammers as here) are using these tools from a perspective of scarcity. Rather than help build more wealth for everyone, they burn wealth through competition. Consider instead as just one alternative if, say, the anti-scammer LLM helped the scammer figure out how to get more meaningful work? Maybe that specific alternative won't be effective (dunno), but the alternative at least points in a healthier compassionate direction. For more on this, see my essay from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and "economic"] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure [and economic] are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military [and economic] uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

itake 2y ago

I think scammers have a specific bad script for a reason. They want to find the most gullible people they can.

szundi 2y ago
Or is it that cheap that they don’t waste time on making it better until the “numbers come”

stavros 2y ago

They have been for years: https://thespamchronicles.stavros.io/welcome/ https://thespamchronicles.stavros.io/welcome/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

K0balt 2y ago

By responding at all, it’s probably just helping spammers warm up numbers, more than anything else. So, counterintuitively, helping the spammers. Spammers need to amass a strong baseline of “organic” received SMS responses in order to be unthrottled so that they can effectively spam. Responding STOP will get the number blacklisted after a relatively few strikes.

ses1984 2y ago
In the US they can just spoof numbers.
- K0balt 2y ago
  Not sure how that works, but I think the message would have to be emitted from an approved dial peer? Or are you just talking about caller id spoofing?
  - ses1984 2y ago
    I was talking about caller id spoofing. If there was another layer to it, I was unaware.
- Evidlo 2y ago
  I'm not sure if any of these numbers are actually spoofed. When I look them up they are always VOIP numbers.

Lio 2y ago

Unless spammers get better at detecting LLMs themselves that will make them easier to tie up so that maybe a win if there is some cost in do so. If the spammer’s LLM costs more to run that the decoy LLM it may be possible to make still be possible to make it an unprofitable activity.

catlifeonmars 2y ago
Spammers (and scammers) are incredibly cost sensitive. It’s still an arms race in that regard.

base698 2y ago

This was a major plot point of the movie Her. I remember thinking it was wild when it dawned on me that was what was happening in human to human interactions. Now here we are.

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

This this reminds me of a call in the '90s where I was calling from France a support in the US. I told them that I was calling from France but the insisted on having a US number to connect me "if needed". I saw a number on a paper ad on my desk and proceeded to spell it out, stripping the +1. I wondered several times since then whether their telemarketing dept contacted the telemarketing team in that other company.